During the lecture on BigBrain anatomy for beginners there was a question concerning the proportion between the two kinds of cells found in brain tissue: glial cells and neurons.
Very many text books state that the human brain has a glia:neuron ratio of 10:1. But they never provide a reference to underpin this information!
The group of Suzana Herculano-Houzel published a very nice article (https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.21974) on the numerical relationship between neuronal and non-neuronal (i.e. glial) cells in the human brain.
ha! interesting. So it’s mainly because there’s very few neurones in the white matter, and then there’s this huge, exponentially growing region, composed mostly of non-neuronal cells. Thank you! 